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New York, 11:22 PM
Mon Nov 16
59 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/16/09
09/15/09
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09/15/09
Obviously this is not a black-and-white issue. Pareene and his mom should do a Gawker Lincoln-Douglas debate on the topic.
Van Jones and Glenn Beck can be on the judge's panel.
09/15/09
I would love to hear Pareene's thoughts.
09/15/09
09/15/09
And so when a woman who is not my mother refers to her son (and not her stepson!), you can be reasonably sure that she is not talking about me.
As for me, a white kid choked me during gym class in 4th grade and I was mugged by a black man at knifepoint in Bushwick some years ago but I would not call either of those incidents racially motivated.
09/15/09
Also, sorry John. I just was really interested.
09/15/09
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09/15/09
I didn't provide the stats nor do I support Pareene's step-mom's unsupported assertions.
09/15/09
09/15/09
That the right wing has of late begun channeling its inner Strom Thurmond (I'm looking at you, Glenn "Obama-hates-his-mama's-culture" Beck) should be of surprise to absolutely no one. They have no other leg to stand on.
But even this remaining leg is becoming ever weaker. Even GW Bush had some small insight into that fact. Atwater's dead, and the effectiveness of his dog-whistle racism is slowly but surely following him to the grave. It's still alive in the shrill pockets, but the middle section of the country is largely unimpressed.
I think Obama understands this perfectly well, which is why he seldom lets his blood rise above room temperature on the issue. He has walked among the white people for many years, and he knows better than most how in-denial and out-of-touch most of us are about the whole race thing. So he's careful to show glimpses of anger and passion only when his advisors tell him it's safe to do so. Better to err on the side of automaton than risk the dreaded perception that one is an "angry black man."
No, this is not the "post-racial" era. But it ain't the 1960's, either.
The right-wing is freaked out, and they should be freaked-out. Their champion for the previous eight years (1) blew the budget, (2) got us into an unnecessary war, and (3) screwed the pooch six ways to Sunday. They lost both houses of Congress and the White House in the process, and most of the country is of the considered opinion that they deserved to lose it.
So now the wingnuts are screaming like banshees and waxing incoherent at every turn. Don't let the Prez hypnotize our kids with a boring speech about staying in school. Don't accept Obama's American birth without an actual placenta sample (props to The Onion). Scream "Commie/Nazi" whenever the mood strikes, sometimes paradoxically at the same time.
They're screaming, and they're going to keep screaming, because it's all they can really do at this point.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are going to pass health care reform. It won't be pretty, and it won't be perfect. The public option issue will have to be decided in reconciliation. But once it's passed, it can't be un-passed, any more than Social Security or Medicaid and Medicare. And alot of GOP politicians will then face the grim prospect of explaining to 45 million voters why they tried to deny them medical coverage.
And that, as they say, is that. The screams you hear are really just the screams of a shrinking group of people in a boat that is taking on water.
09/15/09
09/15/09
Now he actually has a legitimate commercial sponsor; HOTELS.COM.
Please remember HOTELS.COM, and that it completely endorses the Drudge Report.
09/15/09
09/15/09
09/15/09
BTW: "Green Cards" could be another affiliate program and if an author doesn't buy an ad, Drudge could profit by selling a book through Amazon.
09/15/09
As for the juxtaposition of photos and whatnot, I'm sure Drudge is trying to play to the Republican base, but thankfully, the majority of those looking at his site are just a tiny handful of media folks and because it's hard to subliminally push someone against their bearings, his effort should have little effect.
09/15/09
09/15/09
Sure, the linked sales literature shows his site in a favorable light, but he's just getting 1.86% of those who visited a "news and information" site, among those surveyed. This doesn't represent a lot of people.
Heck, the whole top ten list adds-up to less than 30% of this fragment of a fragment and now that everybody has RSS feeds which are easily filtered and news sites have proliferated, it isn't like Drudge's layout matters as much anymore. He's really mostly read by the media and if anyone understands the tricks of the trade, I assume it'd be them.
09/15/09
09/15/09
09/15/09
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09/15/09
This white backlash is gaining steam by the day and it is an absolutely sickening thing to watch. Apparently blacks can have modest civil rights but only if they don't ever ascend to positions of power or prestige.
09/15/09
Rich WASPs don't buy that stuff. Gotti boys and Lohans do.
Also, Tyson Beckford is a Polo model.
As for the rest of your comment, I agree. If I see one more drooling redneck with a misspelled sign calling Obama a "muslin", I'll defenestrate my TV.
09/15/09
Care to take another whack at the lead?
09/15/09
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09/15/09
During the election, I went to that freerepublic website to just see what the fringe were thinking about Obama. And in between the hysterical "Obama is a Muslim terrorist" posts there was almost always some post about a crime where the victim was white and the perpetrator was not. They were usually about some minor incident that would have never been reported beyond the local paper. But these types of posts seemed to be catnip to the posters there, like it served as proof that AAs, or anybody non-white, were violent inferiors to them. The comments made in response to these types of posts were toe-curling in their veiled and not so veiled racism.
So...that Drudge would do this is not remotely surprising to me.
09/15/09
09/15/09
It's not like Gawker routinely reports on high school fights that involve two or three white kids getting into a fist fight with a black kid and labels them as hate crimes and calls them racially motivated. So I'm not seeing some big hypocrisy in Gawker noting that sometimes a black kid beating up on a white kid is just two kids fighting.
09/15/09
And I was trying to say that the newsworthiness of many "racially motivated" cases seems to rest solely on the fact that the victim was [a minority] and the attackers were white. I don't care why Cook wrote it.
09/15/09
This incident just seems like a schoolyard fight and the only reason it is being reported is because of the races involved and assumptions gleaned from that.
09/15/09
Also, were a busload of white kids to have pounced on a black kid whilst the rest of the bus cheered... you can bet your ass it would get covered. Stories like this (and the Ohio family attacked by a gang of young black kids screaming 'it's a black world') don't prompt any ink... but if Gawker finds out some white male did something anywhere near a black male, it's on, baby.
Honestly, I think the race card has been tossed out so many times, so outrageously, to defend the President, that it will lose the majority of its explosiveness by the end of the year.
But, hey, you're continuing the long liberal tradition of thinking you can retain your intelligencia membership card by focusing on the evils of your own race and trivializing those of any other. Good luck with that.
09/15/09
09/15/09
So we're lacking in racial solidarity? And if you want to show me an evil committed by "any other" race that I've trivialized, I'd be much obliged.
09/15/09
I do not consider myself a liberal, and I think the actions by the black kids on the bus was disgusting. Inexcusable.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way,
Question: Do you think this deserves to be -- or ought to be -- the top story on Drudge, a site that disproportionately influences media coverage of national events.
Just asking.
09/15/09
09/15/09
I guess this is what white people get for trying to raise "color blind" children in a post-racial society. You bite your tongue and tell them that black kids are not all gangsters and savages and you send them off to public school and hope for the best.
Had the races of the involved parties been reversed, we all know the media ****storm coming to Belleville Ill., but since that won't happen in this case, Drudge gave it the outrage it deserves.